Tex's TNG reviews: The Neutral Zone

It was the writers' INTENTION that it be the first intimations of the Borg. What it WAS, though, as made, was a big non sequiter with no payoff or point.

In Q Who I think they made it clear that it was the Borg that were responsible for those outposts along the border.

Yep.

In "Q-Who" the first planet the Enterprise encounters when sent thousands of light years away by Q its stated that the "damage is identical to that at the outposts along the neutral zone".

A minute or two later the Borg show up.

And in the opening of "The Best of Both Worlds" similiar damage is shown on the planet surface.

Clearly, it is all but said that the Borg took out the line of outposts along both sides of the neutral zone.

How or why the Borg didn't launch further attacks then of course is a mystery.

Events on Earth in the late 1980s conspired to forestall the Borg in the mid 2360s

So we essentially had to wait howevermany epsiodes it was to find out what caused the damage. That would be fine in a serialized show that introduces little events that build to a greater whole over the course of a season (like Buffy or B5), but TNG (and TV in general, at the time) was episodic. So it stands as a poorly written episode with pointless meanderings.

I think it was a fantastic episode given the writers' strike. There was no pointless meandering at all. It reintroduced the Romulans and left us knowing that there was something quite powerful lurking out there to worry about. The B plot with the people from our time just makes it that much better. I am now officially bumping my rating up to because of Forbin's futile resistance to recognize it's greatness.

I really wish that the Voyager episode dealing with aliens planning an invasion of Starfleet had been those worm creatures instead of 8472.

The outposts that were attacked in the Neutral Zone were most certainly carried out by small Borg scout ships, easily defeated by the Romulans. The Borg probably had more of an interest in the Romulans because they used freaking black holes to power their ships, whereas Starfleet vessels had the same old matter/antimatter power used throughout the Delta Quadrant. It wasn't until Q shot the Enterprise back to the Alpha Quadrant at impossible speeds in front of a Borg cube did they become interested. The message sent in Regeneration would also have reached the Borg around that time, thus making them ignore the Romulans. Also, the Hansens followed the Borg in nothing more than a pimped out Runabout. The Borg didn't see them as a threat until they found out the Hansens were spying on them. They saw that the ship used simple matter/antimatter and thought the entire species didn't need to be assimilated yet.

Right but then later on, in the same episode, the Borg storyline contradicts itself by claiming that this is the Borgs first encounter with the Federation.

I'm curious, is this in a book or something? Because I'd like to know how the Romulans easily defeated the Borg.

Not familiar with the capabilities of small Borg scout ships but scooping up whole outposts seems only possible by a formidable ship.

As good a bit of speculation as any.

Interesting idea yet The Borg had already decided to assimilate the Enterprise before that happened. Seems they were interested in the matter/antimatter powered ship.

Wait, so they wouldn't be interested in ships powered by freaking black holes? Not to mention an enemy that had easily defeated them?

Basically true, a cube once scanned the Raven and ignored it. But for most of the time the Raven was essentially invisible to the Borg because of some nifty shields.

My point about the Hansens is that Seven of Nine's age suggests the Hansens went looking for the Borg before the events in "Q Who" happened.


I checked StarTrek.com and found this bit:

Pretty weak IMHO.

I think scout ships are basically smaller versions of the Borg Sphere seen in First Contact. Yes, they'd be capable of of scooping up small outposts, and they could probably be defeated by Romulans. Or they could have wandered into a wormhole or any other anomaly. Perhaps the Tactical Cube the Enterprise encountered in the Delta Quadrant was being dispatched to take care of the Romulans?

They only assimilated information from the ship at first, as they do with most species. Once they realized the ship had traveled 7,000 light years in a matter of seconds, they sliced that hole in the saucer. That's when the Enterprise got the fuck out of Dodge with another 7,000 light-year boost from Q, further piquing the interest of the Collective. All of a sudden, the Romulans didn't seem so interesting anymore. This "Starfleet" is capable of going 7,000 light-years per second.

The Tactical Cube the Enterprise-D encountered could have been dispatched in response to the message or in response to the Romulans. Either way, the Enterprise got their attention and they sped up their assault.

It's all, of course, pure speculation, based on the given information. You're trying to poke at stuff which have been left vague for a reason. The Borg are mysterious. Ooga-boogah.

I'm willing to believe that there were rumors in the scientific community about a species of cybernetic beings. In their logs, I think the Hansens even stated that they weren't sure if they would find anything since the Borg were just rumors. So they set off to explore the unexplored regions of the Beta Quadrant, violating orders from Starfleet. A small gravitational eddie or wormhole or whatever it was boosted them a few hundred light-years into the Delta Quadrant (or close to it).

Still, it was pretty fucking stupid to bring a kid along.

Well, along the thought train of easily beatable Borg scout ships, let's not forget Hugh's ship.

That wasn't a whole cube, and exactly who kicked it's ass?

If it were Starfleet, Picard woulda known.
And the Klingons woulda crowed about it to everyone.

Hadda be Rommies.

So, there you go.

Why would Starfleet tell everyone about those outposts. Seems like a kind of thing you want to know more about before making it public knowledge. Anyway, I wouldn't put all my faith in a throw away line here and there. We all know the big picture and I like the forshadowing done in The Neutral Zone.

Bottom line is...if it wasn't the Borg that caused such devastation, who was it?

Zombie Kirk.

That might technically be true; the Neutral Zone dates back to the end of the Romulan War, pre-Federation (so those outposts may well have been there for 200+ years, using (obviously not exclusively) pre-Federation technology), and covers the entirety of the border between the Federation and the Romulan Empire, which is sort of shaped like the top third of the letter 'S', only taller. Some of those outposts are actually pretty far from the main body and even the outlying colonies of the Federation, and quite a long distance from Romulus and Remus.

Coulda been the ever-formidable ion storm.

Well nothing wrong with speculating, especially when there’s nothing else to go on.

Yep, that was the sequence of events.

Nope, that’s when the Enterprise sent an away team over to the cube and they along with the Enterprise were ignored.

Seems they had just finished assimilating a planet when they happened upon the Enterprise.

They sped up as the Enterprise tried to escape.

What reason? I think it was sloppy writing more than anything else.

The weakness is contorting the story to allow Seven of Nine to even exist. Voyager needed a boost in the ratings, the Borg were the favorite villains at the time, what better than to have a Borg join the crew? Not just any Borg, a human female Borg from Earth who likes cat suits and high heels.

To be fair, it worked.

Hugh’s ship was tiny compared to a cube, it only had room for five Borg, I doubt it would’ve been capable of scooping up entire outposts.

C’mon D, there are more than three space faring species in the Star Trek universe.

Sure Starfleet might well keep it a secret but wouldn’t the Borg share the information about Starfleet’s existence?

First off, in my opinion, it was the Borg that caused the devastation in “The Neutral Zone.” That’s the basis for the contradiction in “Q Who.” I found it mildly amusing that the Borg inconsistencies start in the very first episode in which they appear.

As for who else could of caused the devastation, the candidates are limited only by your imagination.

I imagine a Crystalline entity could pull it off.

Here's a rough map of the Trek Galaxy: http://www.stdimension.org/Cartography/Source/map_quads.gif (might need to copy/paste)

Here's a rough map of Alpha Quadrant Territories, including the United Federation of Planets (UFP) and Romulan Star Empire (RSE): http://www.stdimension.org/Cartography/Source/maplocal.jpg (again, might need to copy/paste)

While the UFP seems to surround the RSE towards the center of the galaxy, they probably are very populated anyway and the Borg could have easily slipped through undetected. I also think it's weird how both the Romulan and Cardassian homeworlds are so close to their border with the Federation.

They should have just made her one of the 18 people that got sliced out of the Enterprise D's saucer section. She would have been around 16 or 17 at the time. They could have had flashbacks of Wesley's failed attempts to date her.

Well the episode begins on stardate 41986.0 and Picard states that it was on stardate 41903.2 when the last communication from the outposts occurred. Not really sure if that helps or hurts your case.

Damn, that would've been so much better!

And what exactly does the borg's knowledge of the federation have to do with the price of dilithium on Rigel III? The question is about when the majority of Starfleet knew about the Borg.

This thing with "who new about the Borg and when" shows us a fundamental weakness of The Next Generation.

When The Original Series introduce their villians to the viewers, Romulans, Klingons, even Tholians, it was NEVER the first time the Federation had encountered them. There was always a history there. Which helped avoid continuity errors later on.

In The Next Generation, aliens like The Borg, Ferengi, even Trills were all treated when seen in the series as "first contacts". Yet later, we have clear indications that all three had contact with the Federation for years if not decades.

The Original Series wasn't so puffed up with its own importance that every alien encounter had to be a "first" by the Enterprise crew.

For that matter, one of the great things about the Original Series was that the Enterprise (unlike in later series) wasn't a brand new ship, but one with decades of history already.

Yep. They even felt the need to make the Romulans "born again". In fact, their reevaluation of the Fed-Klingon relationship made them almost "new" again as well. On the Trill, however, to be fair, they were little more than a FOTW race until DS9 was created.

The only recurring race that TNG introduced properly from the gitgo was the Cardassians, and to a lesser extent the Bajorans.

And the Pakleds, the most consistently written species ever.